The present invention relates to the general field of telecommunications.
It relates more particularly to mechanisms for controlling data streams broadcast by a source over an IP network, for example multimedia data streams broadcast in multicast mode in an Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) infrastructure.
A preferred application of the invention, which is not limiting on the invention, is in the context of managing and using a time shifting service managed by a telecommunications network. This kind of service is known as network time shifting (nTS).
As known in the art, an nTS service enables an end user receiving on terminal equipment an IPTV data stream broadcast in real time (commonly called a “live data stream”) to command control operations on the data stream (or to be more precise a recording of the data stream) in a manner analogous to a video recorder, for example control operations such as play, pause, rewind, stop, etc.
The deployment of such a service by a telecommunications network operator requires broadcast servers in the network. These broadcast servers must be adapted to capture (i.e. to record) in circular buffers the data streams for which the operator wishes to offer this service and then to broadcast these data streams to the terminal equipments of users subscribing to the service as a function of the operations requested by those subscribers.
In the prior art, the broadcast servers in question are programmed with a predefined list of data streams to be captured to enable permanent capture of all the data streams for which the operator wishes to offer this service. This therefore requires the deployment of a large number of servers and/or servers of very high capacity, in order to be able to offer this service for a large number of data streams (i.e. channels broadcast by the telecommunications network) and for a large number of subscribers. This constraint is especially problematic given that at present the number of data streams broadcast over telecommunications networks is constantly growing.
There is therefore a need for a solution for managing a control service of this kind that does not have these drawbacks.